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May 7, 2009

Manny Tests Positive For PEDs, Suspended 50 Games

Manny Ramirez has tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs and will be suspended 50 games starting today, The Times has learned.

The test result and suspension is expected to be announced later today.

The suspension will cost Ramirez $7.7 million, or roughly 31% of his $25-million salary. Players in violation of baseball's drug policy are not paid during suspensions.

Ramirez is expected to attribute the test results to medication received from a doctor for a personal medical issue, according to a source familiar with matter but not authorized to speak publicly. ...

Ramirez would become the biggest star suspended under an oft-criticized major league testing program that started in 2003. He had been a model citizen since arriving in Los Angeles last August, following a stormy tenure with the Boston Red Sox. ...

Well, shit. SoSH says Gammons saying not steroids, but a prescription from his doctor that he was told was not banned by MLB (tic tacs?). We shall see.

In saying I don't much care which players are/were using, I'm assuming I have been fairly consistent in my comments about that for the last 5+ years. (Maybe someone will show that somewhere I acted like Dick Young, but I doubt it.)

I'll laugh and post about Yankees who get caught because I'm hard-wired that way. No other reason. Fat Billy and Slappy McBitchtits still belong in the Hall of Fame.

I don't really believe these guys anymore when they say it was a doctor's prescription that they thought was OK ... or they thought it was a vitamin B12 shot their teammate was giving them ... or that somehow they ate their twin in the womb (OK, that was cycling). They have come up with every excuse in the book.

"Recently I saw a physician for a personal health issue. He gave me a medication, not a steroid, which he thought was OK to give me. Unfortunately, the medication was banned under our drug policy. Under the policy that mistake is now my responsibility. I have been advised not to say anything more for now. I do want to say one other thing; I've taken and passed about 15 drug tests over the past five seasons. I want to apologize to [Dodgers owner Frank] McCourt, Mrs. McCourt, [manager Joe] Torre, my teammates, the Dodger organization, and to the Dodger fans. LA is a special place to me and I know everybody is disappointed. So am I. I'm sorry about this whole situation."

The reports are that it was some kind of female fertility drug called HGC that bodybuilders take when coming off a steroid cycle.If true, that's pretty damning. Why would Manny be taking a female fertility drug?

In the world of performance enhancing drugs, hCG is increasingly used in combination with various anabolic androgenic steroid (AAS) cycles. It is included in some sports' illegal drug lists.

When AAS are put into a male body, the body's natural negative-feedback loops cause the body to shut down its own production of testosterone via shutdown of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis (HPGA).

In males, hCG mimics LH and helps restore and maintain testosterone production in the testes. As such, hCG is commonly used during and after steroid cycles to maintain and restore testicular size as well as endogenous testosterone production. However, if hCG is used for too long and in too high a dose, the resulting rise in natural testosterone will eventually inhibit its own production via negative feedback on the hypothalamus and pituitary.

Looks like it's a women's fertility drug that is sometimes perscribed for male weight loss. It has a use within the steroid-user community: when coming off a steroid cycle, the body doesn't produce enough of its own testosterone (which is sort of why testicles shrink) and steroid users use this drug to kick start testosterone production in the body. Apparently it gets used after HGH cycles. The test where he tested positive was during Spring Training apparently.

I don't know how long this would stay in one's body, but it makes me wonder about the trouble getting his contract worked out this offseason and his late arrival to Spring training. I'll happily admit that's total conjecture and bordering on MUMS.

He says that the drug was for a "personal health problem" and that he checked the substance against an older, non-current list of banned substances, from which it was absent. Apparently the substance wasn't banned until recently.

"... testing by Major League Baseball showed that Ramirez had testosterone in his body that was not natural and came from an artificial source ...The sources said that in addition to the artificial testosterone, Ramirez was identified as using the female fertility drug human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG. ...ESPN reported earlier that testing showed Ramirez had used hCG, which is typically used by steroid users to restart their bodies' natural testosterone production as they come off a steroid cycle. It is similar to Clomid, the drug Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi and others used as clients of BALCO. ...Ramirez's case was set off when a test in spring training revealed he had elevated levels of testosterone in his body. MLB followed up with a more comprehensive test that confirmed the testosterone had to come from an artificial source, the sources said.While investigating, MLB obtained documents that indicated Ramirez's use of hCG, and it was those documents that formally were used to hand down the 50-game suspension."